The point of the article is that he can set the C and D scales to the proportion he needs, one time, and then just move the slider around for each ingredient, rather than doing a different calculation for each ingredient. Knowing when to vary the proportion is just basic cooking knowledge which would have to be applied either way.
gruez|1 month ago
Is punching a number into a calculator and then multiplying by M (memory function, for the scale factor) really that much work than carefully sliding tithe slider into position and reading/eyeballing the output?
paulmooreparks|1 month ago
majormajor|1 month ago
Random dumb example: say you need 6/7ths of 3/4 of a tablespoon of table salt... or 0.64 tablespoons. That's not gonna be a common measuring device.
Look it up in terms of grams, though, call it 20g per tablespoon (or measure the original amount in grams if you like), multiple by .64, get 12.8g, use your scale to get ~13. I'm more confident in my ability to get 13g with my scale than I am to get 0.64 tablespoons (half + half of a quarter is what I'd have to use with my measuring stuff, and the "half of a quarter" is annoying when they're rounded and all...). If your voice assistant can take care of the conversions, it GREATLY speeds it up too.
(The observant could respond here that 0.64 tablespoons is damn close to 2 teaspoons and so this example off the top of my head is dumb. Which is true, but frankly I have to look up a bunch of those sorts of things any time I try them, and it could've landed on something more awkward like 0.4 tablespoons total.)
rmunn|1 month ago
Correct, first thing I thought of. :-)
> ... and it could've landed on something more awkward like 0.4 tablespoons total.
Let me try to tackle that one. 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons, so that's 1.2 teaspoons. Most tablespoon & teaspoon sets have a 1/4 teaspoon as the smallest available measurement, so I'd probably make that 1.25 teaspoons and leave the 1/4 teaspoon not quite full.
I know several families who homeschool. Getting kids to help you in the kitchen is apparently a very good way to get them comfortable with doing math with fractions.
Incidentally, our own problems go the other way. My wife likes to get recipes from American recipe sites that give measurements in cups or tablespoons, but we live outside America (I got a job overseas) so the local store sells things in grams or kg. So when I'm doing the grocery shopping on my way home from work, I often have to look up "how much does one cup of sour cream weigh" to know whether I should buy the 250g package or the 1kg package. Once the ingredients arrive in the kitchen, we find the fraction math easy. (Though we also, very often, make use of the kitchen scale in measuring ingredients).